Archive for June, 2010

In case you hadn’t noticed, the Time Inc. publications—including People, Sports Illustrated and Time—recently disappeared from your Nexis and Factiva accounts. This stems from an exclusivity contract Time Inc. inked with EBSCO earlier this year. While the research community hoped the deal might still allow other aggregators to continue providing access to the publications, so far, no luck. Apparently, EBSCO will soon be the only fee-based aggregator with the archives. (According to Library Journal, Gale retains them through 2010.) Nexis Senior Director of Licensing Dave Oakley hasn’t given up hope things will change, but it doesn’t look promising.

“We’ve left the door wide open, though at the moment talks are not continuing with EBSCO,” Oakley said last week in an e-mail exchange. “Given my understanding of the exclusive arrangement, any after-market licensing has to run through EBSCO.”

The true irony is that at least two research departments within the Time Inc. empire—and likely more—don’t subscribe to EBSCO. That’s not to suggest those departments don’t have access to their own backfiles. They do, through an internal database. But what it does say is that Time Inc. seems to have no problem forcing everyone else to access its archives through an aggregator the company’s own researchers don’t consider worth a subscription—Nexis and Factiva users be damned. (more…)